The 8 Barriers To Delegation
UNDERSTANDING THE BARRIERS TO DELEGATION IN MANAGERS
Delegation as a leader is an essential skill, one which does not just allow your team to thrive and for each member to achieve their potential, but also allows your vision and your business to thrive. As the barriers to delegation below demonstrate, it is not an easy skill, and it requires conscious effort to do consistently. The rewards, however, are huge.
Delegation is absolutely necessary for the establishment and maintenance of a highly motivated, high achieving team, and for maintaining a balance of challenge and support. It is not a dispensation of leadership; far from it. It is exceptional leadership with a strong vision and the confidence to trust in the team’s ability to perform.
Many managers and leaders, however, often find the delegation step in Liberating Leadership difficult and uncomfortable. They are often reluctant to make the mindset change required to enable their team to perform brilliantly and beyond expectations.
In order to understand this you only need to hear how they express and rationalise their unwillingness to delegate wholeheartedly.
The 8 barriers to delegation are:
1. I can do it better myself.
2. My people are just not capable enough.
3. It takes too much time to explain what I want done.
4. If it goes wrong I’ll still be accountable.
5. Delegation reduces my own authority.
6. I’ll be shown up if they do too good a job.
7. My people prefer that I make the decisions.
8. Team members want to avoid responsibility (at least at work).
As you go through these barriers to delegation what do you notice?
They are all limiting beliefs about the team or the manager’s ability, which will prevent them from delegating effectively! No doubt the team members will pick up any incongruence within the manager or leader when they do attempt to delegate and maybe seen to slip into micromanagement. True delegation requires the exact opposite: the ability and the confidence to let go.
You might want to ask yourself which one of these, if any, apply to you?
Many of these barriers involve assumptions about what the people in your team think or want. Interrogating these assumptions, and open, honest discussions with your team, are a necessary first step into overcoming such barriers and achieving an effective mode of leadership with delegation at its core.
Working through these barriers and implementing greater consistency of delegation in leadership will set you and your team apart from the competition and will create an environment in which vision and ambition can soar. It is truly liberated leadership; freeing you from the barriers holding you back.
“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”
How do you overcome the barriers to delegation?
